The finest artists do not make art based on all the art they've seen. They make art from the life they've seen, and the things they think about. They learn techniques for using media directly and also from previous art. Art also teaches topics, and artistic attitudes, and history. Anyone might learn more history by learning about art. Computer software cannot learn from life, it can only learn by looking at art. I new a young composer who wrote baroque 17th-century music because he had tried to make music from having learned other music. I hope he improved as he learned some life. Stop stealing art!

I understood Brenda Laurel in "Computers as Theater" to mean that you can have too much metaphor. It's been almost 25 years but I think she meant that we have the metaphors for computer work: files, commands, buttons, scroll bars etc. So it was too much to layer the ways people imagine artists think on top of it. I was a computer programmer and have learned to use GIMP, and get better with time. I find the popular programs very very hard to use, such as Krita and DarkTable or whatever the linux one is called. I am showing photographs in 3 shows next month, and sometimes write my own image processing programs. (Such as a real total histogram equalizer, you know, that makes a flat rectangular histogram and not just moving the modes around)